CDC expands ‘bush meat’ tests for viruses

With modest funding — $59,740 — the CDC is expanding virus testing nationwide to bush meat confiscated at 18 of the agency’s 20 quarantine stations, typically located at airports. The CDC official who heads up the effort, Nina Marano, said the program’s funding is uncertain beyond this year.

“So much of this is smuggled in, we can’t find it, can’t track it,” Marano said. “We’ll never get a complete picture.”

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Some experts are worried that efforts to stem the bush meat trade are too meager. “We could do a much, much better job than we have done previously,” said George Amato of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For the CDC pilot project, whose results were published in the journal PLoS One this month, Amato examined the DNA from confiscated bush meat to identify what species the parts came from.

“This is the kind of study that, if Michael Crichton were still alive, he would turn it into a novel,” Amato said. “This is how a new pathogen could emerge.”

At the CDC’s Dulles station, Miguel Ocana, a physician, is the only employee. Last summer, Customs and Border Protection agents passed him monkey parts that they found in a well-taped box. (Border agents find many bizarre items at Dulles.) Ocana extracted a bit of tissue and sent it off for testing.

“African rodents are very common,” Ocana said of some packages that arrive in his office. “Sometimes you have to put the pieces together like a puzzle to find out what you’re dealing with.”

Virus hunter W. Ian Lipkin would also like to know what he’s dealing with. Many of the CDC’s bush meat samples land in his laboratory at Columbia University. There, Lipkin’s team tests the meat for known — and, with advanced techniques, unknown — viruses. His search for previously unseen viruses in the bush meat is just beginning, and the animal parts keep piling up.

“I like to call this medical intelligence,” said Lipkin, who in 1999 identified deadly West Nile virus in the brains of its first U.S. victims. “We need to know what’s circulating.”